distributed in mimeograph form all of his writings remained in manuscript form during his lifetime, and were distributed amongst his students. Hayward and Hassan list eight of his writings in Arabic, which at the time could be consulted in Mogadishu: Dirdsa fi al-mantiqa 1-Harariyya jughrafiyyan wa bashariyyan, a study of the geography and demography of the Harar region of about 200 pages; two works on history, Janaza shamarikh min hadayiz al-tawarikh 95 pages in length, and Kitab irsal al-sawarikh ila sama' al-tawarikh a history of the Oromo in 56 pages; three religious writings Al-mawahib al-madadiyyah fi l-'awf al-'adadiyya, Muqaddamat taysir al-zari'a (48 pages long), and Taysir al-zari'a ila fuquhiyy fi ahkam al-shari'a; and the two biographies of his teachers mentioned above. Mohammed Hassan made use of Sheikh Bakri's Kitab irsal al-sawarikh ila sama' al-tawarikh in writing his The Oromo of Ethiopia, a History: 1570-1860, describing the manuscript in the bibliography as sketching "an overall panorama of Oromo history from early times to the present. Although it is not free from major limitations on early Oromo history, it contains much useful data on the gada system." Hassan relies on it heavily in his discussion on the gada system. Legacy As noted above, Sheikh Bakri was also a renowned Oromo poet. "Shaykh Bakri, write Hayward and Hassan, "stirred the imagination and captured the love of the Oromo masses by means of his poems, which were composed in their language and were short enough for the people to learn by heart." Sheikh Bakri Sapalo's chief accomplishment is his writing system. Although Oromo has been transcribed using two writing systems Sheikh Sapalo was familiar with, the Ge'ez script and the Arabic alphabet, both are "far from adequate" in Hayward and Hassan's opinion, for reasons they set forth. (Most important being that Amhara has only seven vowels while Oromo has 10.) While they "have no reason whatsoever to entertain the belief that Shaykh Bakri had ever studied modern linguistics, or was acquainted with the concept of the phoneme, it is nevertheless the case that his writing system is almost entirely phonemic; that is to say, it is a system achieving the ideal of just one graphic symbol for each phonologically distinctive sound of the language." They further describe his writing system as a combination of a syllabary and an alphabet in that while the Ge'ez script builds on a consonantal base, the base character never